Major product of Milan / SAT 1-31-26 / Variety of dog associated with King Charles / Daughter of King Minus, in myth / Tubers from which a gluten-free type of flour is derived / Tree growth indicative of good air quality / Protection, as from an organization / Foundation of music?

Constructor: Nick Maritz

Relative difficulty: Easy/Medium



THEME: None

Word of the Day: NEANDERTHAL (56A: Old man?) —

Neanderthals (/niˈændərˌtɑːl, neɪ-, -ˌθɑːl/ nee-AN-də(r)-TAHL, nay-, -⁠THAHL;^[8] Homo neanderthalensis or sometimes Homo sapiens neanderthalensis) are an extinct group of archaic humans who inhabited Europe and Western and Central Asia during the Middle to Late Pleistocene. Neanderthal extinction occurred roughly 40,000 years ago with the immigration of modern humans (Cro-Magnons), but Neanderthals in Gibraltar may have persisted for thousands of years longer.

• • •

Hi again, friends! It's Rafa with another guest blog post. Happy to be back so soon! I hope everyone is having a lovely start to the year. It's a weird time because even though Things In The World seem to be going in quite a scary direction, I've had a really wonderful last few months in my personal life. If that's not the case for you, at least know that we've made it through January! There is sunlight at 5:30pm now! And it's only going to get better!!!

It's quite rare to debut with a Saturday puzzle, so congrats to this constructor on his first NYT crossword! I really really wanted to love this puzzle but to me it was ... just ok. I'm not usually a big fan of this kind of grid shape. It doesn't have that many long entries, so a lot rests on the quality of the top and bottom stacks. The SANTA MONICA PIER / ROLLER COASTER pairing is cute ... but VANILLA ICE CREAM is such an on-the-nose vanilla answer. Just kinda boring. Who is getting excited about VANILLA ICE CREAM in their crossword? Or in real life, for that matter. Don't get me wrong, VANILLA ICE CREAM is delicious, but is it ever the most exciting dessert option?

This is a jaguar (animal)

I've also always been a multi-word answer purist. One-word answers always feel less sparkly to me than multi-word answers, even if the answers are objectively cool and interesting things like PEDIATRICIANS and NEANDERTHAL. Is this something people notice or care about? Let me know! Both those answers did get solid clues -- [Ones who handle minor health problems?] and [Old man?] -- which helped elevate them.

This is a Jaguar (car)

Anyways, I find that for this kind of grid to work, the mid-length answers need to pack a lot of juice. But here stuff like BUILDS UP and ITALIANS and SUPERIOR and MENTORS and CLINICS and REPLIES, etc., while all absolutely solid answers, didn't really do much to zhuzh up the grid, for me. (ZHUZH UP, on the other hand, with its absolutely absurd spelling and scrabbly letters, would certainly have zhuzhed things up.)

This is the Wanamaker Trophy

Having said that, the whole thing was really clean. I'm not sure what ARR means in a sheet music context, and stuff like LAH and PATER feels kinda partial-adjacent, but there is very little to even nitpick in terms of gunky entries. (Some might dislike INCUBI, but I think it's a fun word.) Some solid cluing all around, too. The two aforementioned ones were bangers, plus stuff like [Bolognese, Parmesan, etc.] for ITALIANS and [Part of great deal?] for ACE (the playing card) also made it a fun solve.

That's all from me today. Hope to be back soon!

Bullets:

• 35D: CHIGNON [French bun] — I loved seeing this answer. (This is a hair bun not a food bun, for those unfamiliar.)
• 32D: SUPERIOR [Largest freshwater lake in the world by surface area] — Though I noted this wasn't the most exciting answer, it's nice to get non-ERIE Great Lake representation in crosswords.
• 19A: CEOS [They're at the top of some ladders, informally] — The "informally" in this clue felt really off to me. I don't think "CEOs" is in any way informal. Is anyone saying "chief executive officer"? To me, CEO has reached ATM-level ubiquity, and thus does not require any sort of "informal" tag in the clue.
• 11D: SNELLEN [Herman ___, Dutch ophthalmologist known for his visual acuity testing] — I thought this was the same guy of Snell's Law fame (tbt to high school physics), but, no, Snell is a different Dutch dude.

Signed, Rafa

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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British rowhouses / FRI 1-30-26 / Small branch of Marvel Comics? / Jalapeño topper / Call ahead, in a way / Mylar alternative / Switch to a shorter line, say / Leader of China? / Group of Alpha males? / Piedmont province with a namesake wine / Brand whose logo has an A-shaped caliper / Capture a moment, in fiction / Chaney of classic horror / Elicit the facepalm emoji, say

Constructor: Robyn Weintraub

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: MEWS (31D: British rowhouses) —

A mews is a row or courtyard of stables and carriage houses with living quarters above them, built behind large city houses before motor vehicles replaced horses in the early twentieth century. Mews are usually located in desirable residential areas, having been built to cater for the horses, coachmen and stable-servants of prosperous residents.

The word mews comes from the Royal Mews in London, England, a set of royal stables built 500 years ago on a former royal hawk mews. The term is now commonly used in English-speaking countries for city housing of a similar design. [...] Mews derives from the French muer, 'to moult', reflecting its original function to confine a hawk to a mews while it moulted. William Shakespeare deploys to mew up to mean confine, coop up, or shut up in The Taming of the Shrew: "What, will you mew her up, Signor Baptista?" and also Richard III: "This day should Clarence closely be mewed up".

The term mews is still used today in falconry circles in English-speaking countries to refer to the housing of the birds of prey used in falconry. (wikipedia)

• • •

There it is. There's the Friday puzzle I've been missing, craving, chasing. The one that explodes in bursts of whooshes and zooms but somehow also manages not to be insultingly easy. Choked with marquee answers—really worthy marquee answers. When I say "worthy," that doesn't mean they are all precisely to my tastes—I'd be happy never seeing another Marvel character in my grid again, so BABY GROOT didn't exactly thrill me (33A: Small branch of Marvel Comics?), but even as I entered it in, I thought "that's a pretty good answer for someone who likes that sort of thing" (I had "BABY" and started scrolling through the Marvel hero roster wondering which one they were babifying now: BABY SPIDER-MAN? BABY BLACK PANTHER? BABY THOR!? Then I remembered Groot—the Marvel equivalent of an ENT, i.e. a tree creature (or in the case of BABY GROOT, a little "branch" creature)—and remembered that I had, in fact, seen a BABY GROOT ... somewhere. Comics? Movies? Don't remember). As for the other long answers: yee haw. T-MINUS ZERO got me started, though clunkily, as that exact phrase somehow isn't a top-of-the-brain, rolls-off-the-tongue countdown phrase for me, but after that? The puzzle burst open: "CHECK PLEASE!" GHOST STORIES! GOES BERSERK! and on and on, spiraling through the (SPIRAL) GALAXY. Fourteen (14!) answers of 8 or more letters in length, all of them solid, many of them great. I particularly love the pairing in the SW corner: it's like the puzzle is speaking directly to me, giving advice on how to survive life in an increasingly fascist country that is dedicated to harming its own people (via secret police or infectious diseases, take your pick): "FACE REALITY!" (tough!). "REMAIN CALM!" (tougher!). Good advice! I'll try!

The difficulty for me today was entirely in the short stuff. Luckily, the short stuff is mostly not ugly stuff, so I didn't mind the fight (I do resent fighting for what is ultimately a cruddy answer). Trouble with the short stuff started early, in NW, with both RADIO (2D: Call ahead, in a way) and EDIT (17A: Switch to a shorter line, say). In neither case was I imagining the correct context. I might "call ahead," but I would never RADIO anyone, as I am not a cop checking in with headquarters (or whoever else "radios" on a regular basis. Cabbies? Military personnel?). And the clue on EDIT had me thinking of checkout lines, obviously. I forgot that [British rowhouses] were called MEWS (at M-WS I actually thought "MOWS?"). A LOT was hardish to get to via 32D: Every day, say. And it went on like this, with the clues to the answers testing me, and then the long answers thrilling me. FRAT came as a total surprise (46D: Group of Alpha males?)—is there a FRAT that's abbreviated "Alpha"? I guess the Greek letter alone was supposed to tip me. I had NOTES before TONES (57A: Steps on a scale), which kept that FRAT corner tough. Without a "?" on [Jalapeño topper], the fact that it was a "letteral" clue (referring specifically to the TILDE on the letter Ñ) never occurred to me. In that same section, I wanted SINO- before INDO- (55A: Leader of China?). As for "DEEP," no way (58A: "Whoa ... that's too much for my brain to handle!"). No hope. I don't think the clue is very good. How do I know something's "DEEP" if it's "too much for my brain to handle"? Makes no sense. If my brain can't handle it, maybe it's just "CONFUSING" or "WRONG." Or maybe it's shallow and I'm just "STUPID." Is the tone of "DEEP" facetious? Mocking? Again, without crucial context, this clue did nothing for me. But it's the only toughish clue that I ended up booing at. The rest all seemed fair and fine.

Bullets:

• 5A: Piedmont province with a namesake wine (ASTI) — "Piedmont" = "wine" = four letters = ASTI. Reflex answer.
• 24A: It's -90º at the South Pole: Abbr. (LAT.) — yes I wrote in LOW and no I will not be taking any questions at this time.
• 36A: Brand whose logo has an A-shaped caliper (ACURA) — I never really thought about that logo as looking like anything in particular, but of course it's a caliper. Maybe if I worked with calipers more often (i.e. at all), that fact would've registered.

• 39A: Mylar alternative (LATEX) — again, need context! Looks like maybe ... balloons? Probably other stuff too, but there are definitely both LATEX and mylar balloons.
• 40A: Capture a moment, in fiction (STOP TIME) — "in fiction?" You "capture a moment" by ... depicting it. That's all fiction is. I don't really know what this clue is referring to, specifically. STOP-TIME is also a term from the jazz world: "a technique or effect in which the rhythm section stops playing for one or more beats each measure, usually for a chorus, while a soloist continues to play" (Collins). It's also the name of this song.

• 6D: Eggshell, for one (SHEEN) — another short one that flummoxed me. I knew it was a COLOR or a HUE, a SHADE of, say, stocking, but SHEEN, you got me there. I guess we're talking about paint.

• 28D: Florida setting for "The Birdcage" (SOUTH BEACH) — me: "ooh, I know this." me also: [writes in SOUTH MIAMI]. 

That's all. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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• American Crossword Puzzle Tournament (Stamford, CT, Apr. 10-12, 2026) (registration closed!)

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📘 My other blog 📘:

• Pop Sensation (vintage paperbacks)

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